2023 Skidoo!

Fast Away the Old Year Passes Dept.: Exactly no-one ever has asked me about this, but that won’t stop me from holding forth on a beloved subject, to wit: How I put together a cabaret-show program.

Malcolm Kogut and I will be performing together again a couple of nights from now, making our seventh fairly annual appearance under the auspices of Steamer No. 10 Theatre in Albany, NY. (We skipped 2020 – who didn’t? – and livestreamed 2021 from my house.)

Donald Swann & Michael Flanders

Once again it will be mix of not-often-heard comic and unusual songs, my justification being that I choose numbers with which the audience is unfamiliar so they won’t know if I’m singing it wrong.

My main requirement for a program is variety. Tempo, style, subject matter – it should all be a mixture with a degree of unpredictability about it. I’ve sat through too many performances during which every successive song lopes along at exactly the same speed, each of them (typically) some kind of lament. Singer-songwriters can be the worst offenders. I’ll confess that I’m not as familiar with the popular-music world as my contemporaries (not to mention those who are younger, which covers pretty much everybody in the world), so I don’t have the recognition factor to sell me a song.

Still, you typically won’t have that recognition factor during my shows, but I’m counting on the lyrics especially to delight you. I choose material with a deft setting of words and music, and sing it so that it’s easily understood.

Another factor in programming is continuity. Each song should reflect some aspect of the song before, which is tricky. Here are the first four songs planned for Sunday’s concert:

The Gas Man Cometh
In the Bath
The Spider
The Sloth

All by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, whose timeless, literate material has been a bulwark of my shows since I started over 30 years ago. “Gas Man” is a lively opener, a very funny trifle that draw in the audience as it recounts the travails of getting workers in to fix household problems. “In the Bath” is an easier tempo (“Warmly flowing,” reads the score), and has the charm of more aggressive wordplay even as it paints an improbably picture of luxuriating in one’s tub. “The Spider” ties in nicely: it’s a tale of horror brought on by discovering a spider in that tub, and “The Sloth” is a lovely, contrasting ballad.

We’ll make a big jump to the next song, “I Go So Far with Sophie” by Abner Silver, a very lively Vaudeville-style number from 1922 with an archaically naughty undertone. It suggests a degree of misbehavior, so Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets,” another ballad, wittily portrays the possible punishment.

Staying with Porter, “Don’t Fence Me In” is a medium-tempo number that’s usually familiar to the kind of audience I attract, thus providing a pivot to “Winter Song” by Tom Paxton, one of the most beautiful portraits of the season that I know. Allowing us to finish the first half with one of the most trenchant (but still amusing) portraits of the season: “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service. I declaim this epic poem to an excellent underscoring by Malcolm, something he’s worked out very nicely over the years. And there’s no topping that number, so it’s intermission.

Bringing the audience back after the break requires a good dose of humor, so I’ll recite a silly poem I wrote that carries an unexpected punchline, and then it’s on to that hoary old classic “Asleep in the Deep,” which I start by auditioning an audience member to supply the low F at the end of the song. The participation aspect draws in the crowd, especially as the wonder just when that low F is going to be needed.

Noël Coward’s “Uncle Harry” is another lively, naughty song that probably survives the censors (if any are paying attention) because of simultaneous charm. Not so “Never Hit Your Grandma with a Shovel.” That’s a parody song, written by H. W. Hanemann in the 1930s to mock the style of the 1890s. It’s a medium-tempo ballad with a wonderful payoff, and I insert a spoken interlude of cornball jokes.

Then we get serious with “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead.” The 19th century’s temperance movement had many songs declaring its purpose; this one, which is sung from the point of view of starving, freezing child, goes so far over the top that it mocks itself. And it has a chorus that the audience will be invited to sing. Three times. We make a bit out of it.

Three songs by Tom Lehrer will close the program. They’re effective in this slot, and they’ll help us sell our Lehrer Tribute CD to those fellow-dinosaurs who still use such players. (You can buy yours here.) “Oedipus Rex” bridges from the previous song by keeping it in the family, and then two up-tempo songs to finish: “National Brotherhood Week,” which I fear will never lose its potency, and “The Vatican Rag,” ditto.

There you have it! All of which is to encourage you attendance at our New Year’s Eve show, cunningly titled “2023 Skiddoo!” at 7 PM at Steamer No. 10 Theatre, 500 Western Avenue, Albany, NY. Tickets are already waiting at the door.